Sunday, 23 April 2017

Apparently the Metrobus project will bring wonderful cycling facilities to the city.

We await this with curiosity.

We do know that

right now there is nothing

there is nothing on the travelwest web site about how to get across alive on a bicycle

the travelwest web site can't even get their "out of baldwin street for cars" map right.

Overall not a good sign.

Historically, the crossing which is blocked was a walk/cycle crossing where you could cycle randomly around until you made it over. This never actually glued up very well with baldwin street, on account of the railings and the oncoming traffic; you'd have to head over to the bit of the centre which was bus lane only, cycle over the ped crossings there, or go down the bus & bike bit of road the bus drivers felt were theirs. Or you stay on the ped/cycle inner bit, zig zag through people and children, creating the impression that cyclists were tax dodging criminals who cycled where they shouldn't. Yes, the evening post did an article on that topic a very long time ago.

So, we sent our expendable tax dodger to go west-east across the centre to see how things are today

Pretty awful at the start, mediocre in the middle, and just as bad as before at the end.

Awful at the start: well, what do you do? No signs, just a closed off crossing. Our tax dodger eventually went for the coned off lane in the middle and made their way to the new bit of the centre.

Mediocre at the middle. The one thing the Baldwin Street path gets right is: clearly delineated as a bike path. Tax dodgers stay on it, people don't walk down the middle (Except on friday nights, obviously), and people on the pavement don't have to worry about cyclists weaving through them because there's a f-obvious bike lane to use instead.

The new design has some faint tiles on the ground which may mean its a bike lane. Hard to tell. They don't currently join up with anything.

There's some new lights, possibly split into bike & ped, but with no cues, everyone just spread out. Watch out for the person nearly being hit by the turning bus: bit of a design flaw there, even if that's where the cyclists are meant to be.

Finally, at the end, just as bad as before. It does look like there might be some link off to the left, but again, it's been made out of artisanal tiles rather than useful roadbuilding materials, so who knows. You can avoid worrying about this by getting onto the bus zone, coming off it to get towards the Arnolfini.

Once you've actually crossed the centre, you can get down to the prince st bridge (walking), then on to bedminster. Why? Motaman is having a closing down sale! Bedminster's main shopping destination is being shut down as the building is being turned into flats! Gentrification is coming to Bemmy and it's not good.

Wednesday, 19 April 2017

Known saboteur Redvee has a video up showing the taxi WR54KZX forced to drive on the pavement to turn left into Bridewell Street.

We say forced, as this is clearly due to the Metrobus roadworks going on further ahead on the road. Before Metrobus there were never any queues on the roads leading to the Centre, and so no need for taxis to drive on pavements in order to stop this city grinding to a halt. And, as this is a 2004 EURO3 Diesel taxi, the pollution from its engine is awful, even by the standards of the VW test rigging team. By driving up on the pavement, the Taxi reduced the amount of pollution the city experiences. This is why pavements cause pollution. No pavements: more lanes. No pavements: fewer people walking, no need for zebra crossings or pedestrian phases in lights. We must do more in our city to discourage walking —even more than the Metrobus works team are already doing for us.

One thing to consider though: the taxi did go up the blind spot of that bus. If the bus had turned left the taxi and its passengers could have been crushed.

We propose that every bus and lorry in the city should have a sign warning taxis not to drive up the inside of them to prevent such a calamity happening in future

Tuesday, 18 April 2017

We don't do much coverage of the Evening Post these days, primarily because we've given up reading it. Eventually you get tired of its whiningly repetitive stance against resident parking and 20 mph zones, portraying them as a war on motorists, the death of the cities, a tax on Bristolians, etc. etc. The one thing we never saw was anything praising how the yellow lines have made paveparking and "optimistic corner parking" illegal —and how this was making inner Bristol a nicer place to walk.

Because the bits of the city with RPZ markings have had their pavements restored, and are now easier to walk round with a pushchair those areas still saying "RPZ isn't needed here", such as, say, St Andrews, where the contrast between that and adjacent Montpelier is now significant.

It's interesting to discover then, that the paper has now moved on from "20 mph will kill our city" to "pavement parking is epidemic" and "is pavement parking getting worse?" The latter is quite amusing as we've been covering this issue for coming on a decade, and the main reason we cut back on coverage was that the RPZ reduced it so much that life was boring. It was not "epidemic", it is "endemic": so widespread and ongoing it barely merits a mention.

The BEP hasn't picked up on that, instead it's filled the paper with various photos of what to us look like everyday parking scenes in the bits of the city that aren't RP-Zoned. If you find it shocking, you need to go for a walk. Anyway, they had the pics up, no doubt shocking those people who don't walk further than the car they've parked on the pavement outside their home. For us, all too familiar. Very much all too familiar. In fact, one which was so familiar we recognised it as one of our own photos

This photo originally appeard in a post denouncing the car S589JDG for being parked on the specific bit of pavement where Richmond Road narrows —and in doing so, stopping cars and vans getting down the hill. That was the reason it had earned a note criticising its parking: not for paveparking, but for paveparking in a way inconsiderate of other drivers.

If the requester is one of: Daily Mail, Sun, Telegraph, tell them to fuck off.

If the requester is any other press org, we'd check with the original submitter, probably give approval with credit due us and that original submitter. (if the original author refused, that'd be passed back too)

Videos: Link/embed them without any restrictions (obviously), but no to use in some video remake unless its more than just some branding exercise. And again, the Daily Mail can fuck off.

Now what about publication without getting permission?

If it was timely news, again, no problem.

If it was some photo from the archives, well that's a different matter. Any failure to check there has to be be a due diligence failure or a wilful disregard of our property.

The last time this happened, we extracted a donation to the Bristol Cycling Campaign. Someone had clearly just googled for an image "car parked on zebra crossing", and copied the photo without bothering to question image licensing T&Cs.

What about now?

We see two ways forward without resorting to the legal system, DMCA copyright takedowns, etc.

Easy all round, it'd make upfor publish an article denouncing cyclists for cycling over a shared use bridge designed for walking and cycling on. We'd get some good coverage of the fact that the BEP was now supporting cycling campaigners in the city.

Option two: an in depth review how the RPZ makes walking in Bristol better.

We to collaborate on an article looking at richmond road's pavement parking over time, where the van-passing incident was nearly one of the bad examples. Here we could not only provide photos from our archives, we could approach the Montpelier resident forced to walk her kids home from school down the middle of the road. She could not only cover the experience of a parent in the "before" period, but her experience now that the RPZ has been rolled out. Maybe she could even talk about the impact of the RPZ on driving round the area.

Seems a reasonable choice to us. Fund the cycling campaign after a week of denouncing cyclists for going on a bridge built for them, or get an opportunity to work on a fascinating article looking at how a inner city parental school dropoff experience has been transformed for the better by the RPZ rollout.

Personally, we'd like the article —it would be a good follow up to the previous ones, and we don't want the author of those articles to feel chastised for writing the first articles we've ever seen to criticise paveparking. We'd even help with the content.